There was no telephone links, no television to watch, no daily newspaper to read, and no radio to listen to. So why was this so important? In the early years of the DEWLine, when a person went north, it was generally for several months (or longer) at a time. While some of these people simply used the available Emergency Radio equipment to wile away the long off-duty hours, most spent at least some of their time providing a valuable service to their fellow workmates by arranging for phone patches to their loved ones.įor non-technical, non-hams reading this, a phone patch was a device that connected a radio to the telephone lines and provided the ability for the ham at the southern receiving end to patch their radio into the phone line and then call a person and allow them carry on a conversation with the person on the other end of the radio link, i.e. In Canada, they would have been assigned a VE8 callsign (VE8SJ, VE8SK, etc.). A number of the technical people who went north to the DEWLine held Amateur Radio (Ham) Licenses and applied for permission to operate while in the Arctic.
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